What, Him Worry?

Drudge has a little fun with the president, giving him an Alfred E. Obama sort of pose:

The London Telegraph article Drudge links to is headline, “Libya’s liberation: interim ruler unveils more radical than expected plans for Islamic law.”

Unexpectedly! — It’s not just for economic news anymore.

Elsewhere in the news of the Brave New Middle East, as you already know by now, America will be bugging out of Iraq next year:

President Barack Obama vowed on Friday to pull all U.S. troops from Iraq this year, symbolically ending the war but dashing U.S. hopes of leaving a few thousand troops to buttress a still shaky Iraq and offset neighboring Iran’s influence.

After months of negotiations with officials in Baghdad failed to reach an agreement to keep possibly thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq as trainers, Obama announced he would stick to plans to pull out the remaining force of 40,000 by year’s end.

“After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” Obama told reporters.

The announcement is a milestone more than eight and a half years after the Bush administration led the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein based on warnings of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist.

Obama, eyeing a 2012 re-election campaign likely to be fought over his handling of the U.S. economy, is looking to wind down a decade of war in the Muslim world that did lasting damage to the U.S. image worldwide and stretched its military and budget to the brink.

Or not. As Jim Hoft notes, “Obama’s Failed Stimulus Cost More than 9 Year Iraq War:”

Hugh Hewitt dubs our bug out a “fiasco:”

The outlines of the Iraq fiasco are becoming clear this morning even to the MSM, as this New York Times’ story makes clear.

The transcript of my Friday conversation with AEI’s Fred Kagan will be posted here later today, and while very much worth reading it won’t begin to convey the mixed tone of resignation, weariness and worry in Kagan’s voice.  So much good was accomplished for the people of Iraq but at such a terrible price that this sudden retreat is stunning to the people like the veterans who called yesterday and Kagan who, with a few others, helped craft the successful surge strategy which President Bush adopted.

What must Generals Petraeus and Odierno think, and with them the vast majority of the men and women who served in this long war?

Imagine if the U.S. and Great Britain had simply left Berlin three years after the Berlin Wall went up in 1961.  How long could the city have withstood Soviet pressure, and what chance would there have been of 1989 ever arriving?

Reuters adds, “About 160 U.S. soldiers will remain behind under State Department authority to train Iraqi forces along with a small contingent of soldiers guarding the U.S. Embassy.”

Oh swell — I’ve seen how this movie ends:

Update: Phil Mushnick of the New York Post on the so-called “Arab Spring:”

The “pro-democracy revolution” in Egypt has only thrown the country from idle into reverse. Political and social issues are now a matter for parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood to decide. And to be a non-devout Muslim, or to advocate mere tolerance for those who are not, is to brand yourself an “infidel,” punishable by death, perhaps by stoning.

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the greatest threat to the despotic powers of President and nuclear nut loaf Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not from pro-democracy activists, but from Islamic fundamentalists, anti-democracy hate-mongers convinced that Ahmadinejad is too soft to meet with Allah’s approval. They fought Ahmadinejad’s order to release those young American hikers, imprisoned as spies.

But, gee, it sure was a good story while it lasted. And it lasted for six months. Stay tuned for the next pro-democracy upheaval in the Middle East. It’ll be the first one.

Read the whole thing.